Wispr moves beyond AI dictation with note-taking assistant

Wispr, the startup behind dictation tool Wispr Flow, has created an AI note-taking assistant that records meetings and generates conversation summaries for users.

The Wispr Flow Notetaker tool “captures your meetings so you can stop splitting your attention between listening and writing things down,” said Sahaj Garja, Wispr CTO and co-founder.

Notetaker starts recording with one click, and doesn’t require a bot to attend a video or voice call. It can also be used to capture in-person conversations.

The software has three key functions. Before a call, Notetaker displays a meeting brief with information such as meeting purpose and background of participants.

Once the meeting starts, a live transcript displays the dialogue text and labels speakers. A “what did I miss?” button provides a summary of talking points from the previous few minutes.

Finally, post-meeting, Notetaker generates a more detailed summary organized by topic that includes information such as key dates, decisions, and next steps. Users can search across notes from previous meetings in the Notetaker app. “Over time your meeting history stops being a folder of documents you have to go find and becomes something you can ask questions of,” said Garja.

Notetaker integrates with AI assistants such as Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT via model context protocol. This allows users to connect outputs such as transcripts and summaries “into how you already work, instead of sitting in a separate app,” said Garja.

With Notetaker, Wispr competes in an increasingly busy market for AI note-taking apps that includes Fireflies, Granola and Otter.

Wispr claims Notetaker can produce more accurate transcripts than existing tools, partly because of the additional context it uses during transcription. It uses the same personal dictionary from Wispr Flow that includes acronyms, products, and preferred spellings, and can also draw on other sources such as calendar information to understand the purpose of a meeting and help ensure speakers are labelled correctly.

Before generating the final summary, Notetaker also re-reads the live meeting transcript and combines it with additional context to create a more accurate final output, Garja said.

Notetaker is the first new product launched by Wispr, which was founded in 2021 and has since raised $81 million in funding.

“We didn’t set out to build a dictation app,” said Garja. “The mission has always been to reshape how people interact with their devices, and dictation was the fastest way in.”

“Notetaker is the second product on that path. Dictation took the keyboard out of writing. Notetaker takes it out of meetings, so nobody has to spend the call typing up what everyone just said.”

User consent when recording calls

As AI note-taking tools have become more prevalent in the workplace, privacy concerns have arisen, including the need for all-party consent when recording a call in some jurisdictions, and whether meeting audio is used to train AI models. Two software vendors, Otter and Granola, currently face separate lawsuits in California that allege privacy law violations related to their products.

Wispr Flow Notetaker captures audio locally on a user’s device rather than joining the call as a visible bot. That means there’s no notification to signal that a conversation is being transcribed, which places responsibility on users to disclose the recording to others on the call in accordance with local laws, said Garja.

“Users should always let the other person know before you start recording or transcribing a conversation, whether it’s a video call, an in-person meeting, or a phone call,” he said, adding that Wispr intends to build additional features for automated consent messaging “in the coming weeks.”

Wispr doesn’t train its AI models on customer data without consent, though free and standard tier customers must choose to opt-out, according to Wispr’s privacy terms. Nor does it create “voiceprints or biometric profiles” of users or anyone else on a call using audio recording data, the company says.

When Notetaker is active, conversation audio is captured on a user’s device and processed on cloud servers to enable transcription. The recorded audio file is encrypted and stored temporarily on the user’s device or cloud storage, Wispr said. After a limited period, the audio is automatically deleted.

Notetaker is available with the Wispr Flow macOS app to free and paid subscribers, with support for Windows “coming soon.”ComputerworldRead More